In a shutdown process under a boot mode (e.g., a fast-boot mode) based on hibernation, all statuses of the system need to be stored as a snapshot image in an external memory. The resume process of such a huge image that records all system statuses is very time-consuming. Certain conventional approaches solve the problem by reducing size of the snapshot image. Dirty pages are written to a swap partition in an external memory during a shutdown process of a hibernation-based fast-boot mode, and the remainder memory contents are then written to the external memory as a snapshot image which is much smaller. Only loading a working set is needed in the boot process of a fast-boot mechanism. The related publications and patents are all based on a standard hibernation mechanism in Linux.
When generating a snapshot image in a shutdown process in a hibernation-based fast-boot mode, such fast-boot mechanism writes swappable pages to a swap space of an external memory by using a Linux memory management mechanism. Further, processes of related applications enabled after booting will load pages needed for executing the processes by a demanding page method. However, the above approach involves frequent and complicated I/O operations with external storage devices during shutdown, resulting in a long shutdown time, probably.